I got a lovely note suggesting that I might enjoy this product. And that I could indulge my love of floating heads…

Also in the package was a Kodak Zi6 HD video camera. It’s a small, lightweight cheap thing that can make videos and take photos. It’s incredibly simple to use. Takes AA batteries and standard SD cards and has a built in flip-out USB connector.

It’s by far the simplest way of getting bits of video into a computer I’ve ever come across (short of using an inbuilt webcam). And because it doesn’t look like a video camera people don’t start playing up to it (or geting shy and nervy) in the normal way. And the quality is totally decent enough for online use. Especially in good-ish light.

I’ll post some samples in a minute so you can see the video quality. But I really wanted to talk about the blogger outreach part of it.

The package was sent to me by a lovely guy called Mike Laurie (we used to work together years and years ago at Oven Digital) – he’s a regular commenter on Crackunit and he sends me great links all the time. You should have a look at his blog especially his monster post on viral(s) which I like a lot (he doesn’t seem to have updated in a while though, come on Mike keep it up. Your blog is ace!)

I just thought that there might be an interesting approach wrapped up in this. If you’re doing blogger outreach why not make a few key bloggers your distributors of the blog schwag? Rather than trying to identify 50 people to send something to why not pick 5 people and give them 10 things each to distribute to 10 people that they know / like / respect. Cuts down your work and makes sure that the approach / messaging is relevant to the recipient. I guess it’s like viral schwag.

Just a thought like.

I don’t think that’s what happened here though, Mike works for a company called JPMH who appear to be running this ‘outreach’ activity.